Then, from this and other letters of the same time, we find her much troubled on the subject of serving–maids. Ladies suffering from the same vexations in the nineteenth century, may extend their sympathy across the chasm of three hundred years, from poor dear Mrs. Blank in the next street, to poor dear Mrs. Grünthler in her home at Heidelberg. They may, perhaps, find materials for consolation in their torments, from the discovery, that "the pitch to which things have come now–a–days," had been arrived at three centuries ago, by this monotonously trundling world. [Sidenote: TROUBLES ABOUT SERVANTS.] "The weakness of my health," she writes to John Sinapi, "has within the last few days compelled me to engage the only woman I have been able to meet with. She asks a golden florin a month, reserving too the right to employ a portion of her time for her own profit. Under the pressure of necessity I have been obliged to submit. But all the wealth of Persia should not induce me to keep her any longer. I throw myself, therefore, on your charity for assistance. Do try, if you can send me a servant of some sort, young or old. I can give her five florins a year." She had written to our friend Cremer at Schweinfurth to send her a cook, thinking, that many women might be found anxious to obtain some shelter among those unfortunates who had been made destitute and homeless by the destruction of that city;—"ex miseris illis pauperculis et vagis Suinfordiensibus." But another friend, only designated by the initial N.,[128] writes from that misery–stricken place, to say, that he finds it wholly impossible to send her either an old woman, or a girl,—"anum aut ancillam." All at Schweinfurth are either dead or dying. "The mother of your former maid Kungunga would come, but is laid up with fever. Possibly she may come, should she recover." We find our old acquaintance Barbara come to the surface again, after the cataclysm which had submerged so much that was more valuable. Barbara was willing to return to her old mistress; but then those intolerable "mores" do not seem to have been mended by all that had come and gone since the quiet Schweinfurth days. And this proposal, even in Olympia's pressing need, seems to have been rejected. Though, as she writes to Andreas Campanus, the schoolmaster at Mossbach, she would rather be her own maid, than put up with any such as were to be found at Heidelberg. Are there no ladies recently come from their virtuous shires to establish a home in the great Babylon, who can sympathise with her? Heidelberg was the seat of a brilliant court, and a large university. And, doubtless, the abigails partook of the vices and corruptions incidental to both these phases of social life. The good "ludimagister" of Mossbach would have sent Olympia his own maid under escort of the postman, "cum tabellario," but that she too was down with sickness, as indeed were also all the family of poor Andreas.